A motley crew of right-wing activists, a former Trump administration official, and a disgraced former state attorney general have launched an amateur “grand jury” to vote on whether to indict Dr. Anthony Fauci on fictitious criminal charges. But the effort could also become a windfall for its organizers, with positions on the grand jury selling for as much as $2,500.
The upstart organization, dubbed “America’s Grand Jury,” has no actual legal powers. Instead, starting on April 11, the group will present a livestreamed presentation of Fauci’s “prosecution.” The mock grand jury will also include “evidence” presented by vaccine opponents, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Robert Malone.
The event will culminate in the grand jury voting on whether to indict Fauci. Unlike an actual grand jury, though, the slots on this grand jury have been sold to Fauci-haters willing to splash out some cash to express their dislike for the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. A voting spot on the jury starts at $25 and goes up from there, with those willing to pay $2,500 for “VIP Juror” status receiving one-night access to mingle with anti-vaccine celebs in the grand jury’s green room.
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The mock grand jury even has its own merchandise line, with jurors who pay at least $100 to attain the title of “Super Juror” promised special“swag.”
America’s Grand Jury didn’t respond to requests for comment. Its website referred media requests to a far-right group called the Unity Project, an anti-vaccine group that backed a trucker convoy that traveled to Washington to protest Covid restrictions.
While “America’s Grand Jury” has no ability to actually indict Fauci, its website declares that it will “decide if Anthony Fauci should be INDICTED.” In a much smaller font elsewhere on the page, the group notes that it won’t actually be able to indict Fauci.
The mock grand jury effort is led by Curtis Hill, Indiana’s attorney general between 2017 and 2021. But while Hill is now seeking to indict Fauci, he recently had some legal issues of his own. In 2020, the Indiana Supreme Court temporarily suspended Hill’s license to practice law after multiple women accused him of groping them at an event.
Hill went on to lose his reelection bid in 2020 to another Republican. The former attorney general is also known in his state as an Elvis Presley impersonator.
Hill has been joined on the prosecution team by Parisa Fishback, a California bankruptcy attorney who gained some fame on the right as a parent opposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
The grand jury’s witnesses, meanwhile, are prominent anti-vaccine activists and fringe doctors. Along with Kennedy and Malone, the witness list includes Dr. Paul Alexander, who advised the Trump administration during the pandemic and called for a strategy of herd immunity by pushing more people to contract the virus, declaring “we want them infected.”
While the grand jury has no legal powers, it capitalizes on the right’s fury at Fauci over coronavirus restrictions. In January, Fauci said he and his family had faced death threats over conspiracy theories claiming he somehow played a role in the coronavirus’s creation.
Vigilante grand juries have been deployed before by anti-government sovereign citizen activists, a group known for clashing violently with law enforcement and officials. A collection of sovereign citizens in New York, for example, used bogus grand juries to create what the Southern Poverty Law Center called a “judicial alternate universe” aimed at evading the actual law.
America’s Grand Jury, by contrast, knows that it’s all for show, with no legal weight. But that doesn’t mean it’s stopping with Fauci. According to its website, the mock grand jury also plans to empanel fake grand juries for Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton.
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